JENI O’DOWD: Sussan Ley’s nose dive could be reversed if she tackled the real issue, immigration

It’s remarkable how, when disaster is staring you in the face, the answer is often right in front of you.

Take, for example, Sussan Ley’s leadership. She is going down faster than the proverbial sinking ship, talking about net zero targets, nuclear energy and family values.

Everything except the one subject that hits real nerves in real households: the scale and speed of migration.

The pace of population growth is outstripping every form of infrastructure we have: housing, hospitals, schools and transport. We know this because we are living inside the bottleneck.

When the subject, a genuine touchstone for Australians, came up in early September, Ley removed Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from the shadow ministry.

The catalyst was Price’s comments about Indian migrants and her later refusal to publicly back Ley’s leadership, which Ley said made Price’s position untenable.

Price told the ABC that “large numbers” of Indian migrants were being allowed into the country, adding that the community “votes for Labor”. She later declined to apologise after being accused of racism.

The fact is, there is a Labor lean in parts of the Indian-Australian community. It is not uniform, and no one knows the actual scale because Australia does not record ethnicity on ballots.

But in areas with large Indian-Australian populations, Labor has performed strongly while the Coalition has struggled to connect.

That’s a political reality, not a moral judgment or racist comment. It’s just one more voter group that feels spoken to by one side more than the other.

You don’t have to like it. But pretending that sentiment doesn’t exist is delusional.

Look at One Nation’s surge. A party once described as fringe is now getting double-digit support in national polling.

Look at the recent nationwide March for Australia rallies, when crowds gathered across the country to protest high migration.

Yet the Coalition leadership continues to step around the issue. Why won’t Sussan Ley say out loud what so many voters already feel?

For many Australians, the intake feels too high for our existing infrastructure. This message needs to be hammered home again and again. Why can’t Sussan Ley see this?

Meanwhile, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson is flying to Mar-a-Lago and saying what Ley refuses to say out loud for the world to hear.

She put it bluntly: Australia is bringing in more people than the country can house. You may hate the messenger. You may disagree with the framing. But she is articulating the stress point while the Coalition leadership pretends not to see it.

“If you speak out about it, you’re branded Islamophobic, racist or even a nazi,” Hanson said.

That line lands because it reflects what a chunk of Australians feel: that migration has become an issue people are scared to even discuss without being publicly shamed.

It doesn’t matter whether Hanson is right or wrong on the detail. What matters is that she is talking to the anxiety, and Ley is pretending the anxiety doesn’t exist.

That’s why Newspoll last week put One Nation at 15 per cent. That’s not protest-vote novelty. That’s a party eating the Coalition’s lunch.

When the Opposition won’t talk about the thing people are angry about, someone else will.

And that someone is now speaking to packed rooms in Florida, while Ley hangs on to the leadership by her fingernails.

And here’s what should be setting off a red alert in Coalition HQ: even Barnaby Joyce, the former Nationals leader and two-time deputy prime minister, is now being spoken about in the same breath as One Nation.

Not because he has said he’s joining them, but because the political distance between Hanson’s base and parts of the Nationals’ base is now paper-thin.

When your own voters can see themselves more clearly in Pauline Hanson’s party than in yours, that’s not messaging trouble. That’s a relevance crisis.

When Ley goes, and she will, commentators will say it’s because the Liberals can’t cope with a woman, or because she couldn’t argue clearly enough in Parliament or because she fumbled net zero.

But the truth is simpler. She’s a political dead woman walking because she is ignoring the one thing most Australians are screaming about: quite simply, our migration numbers are too high.